It took a while to really get going, but the final stretch of Westworld’s first season saw shit well and truly hit the fan (spoilers ahead, obviously).
Much to the disappointment of the Man in Black, it became clear that the mysterious maze, rather than being a physical place, was Arnold’s idea of how the hosts could achieve consciousness, and the series culminated in Dolores seemingly doing just that, as she launched a bloody robot uprising against humankind.
A lot of questions need addressing when we return to the park. What will happen to Maeve after her last-minute u-turn? We never actually saw Bernard offing Elsie, while the show kept quiet about the fate of Logan after young William sent him off on a naked horse ride. To say Westworld has loose ends would be an understatement of the highest order.
But season two won’t be getting straight down to all of that, as showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy recently told Entertainment Weekly. “You’re definitely going to see the aftermath and the effects of what happened,” Joy promised fans, but Nolan’s comment was the significant one: “We are definitely not picking up right where we left off.”
Unsurprisingly, plot details are thin on the ground at the moment, and we expect it to stay that way, given Reddit’s knack for working out a lot of the first series’ big twists way before they revealed themselves on screen. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter the pair stopped short of confirming that we’ll see more of what everyone is already calling Samurai World, but they didn’t rule it out. “I think the fun and challenge of this show is that season upon season, we'll only get more ambitious,” Joy said. “We will ultimately encounter other worlds. Just when and where remains to be seen.” We don’t know if the second season will adopt a multiple timeline approach to storytelling like the first did, but Nolan has said there will be more of a focus on the guest experience this time.
Lots to ponder, then. Luckily, we’ve got absolutely ages to do so, as Westworld isn’t scheduled to return until 2018.
